I've had an ASIC miner (the only viable way to mine Bitcoin) at home for testing purposes and you can rest assured, that the power usage and noise profile of those devices is incomparable to any home purpose device. We're talking 3 kW constant load, meaning 26 MWh or 26,000 kWh per year. Per capita electricity usage in Europe is around 5,600 kWh per year [1], that is about ~4,6 times less, including your whole gaming setup all other appliances.

Also, the noise of the fans required to cool such an electric load will get you thrown out of any apartment complex fast, not even considering that this heat is dissipated into your living room which would lead to somewhat uncomfortable room temperatures of over 30°C even in the coldest of winters.

What you're probably thinking about is GPU-based mining, but that has nothing to do with Bitocin.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1262471/per-capita-elect...

>A typical single-person household utilizes around 2-3 kWh per year, that is about ~1,000 times less, including your whole gaming setup all other appliances.

What do you base your 2-3 kWh number on? Because there's literally no way that's true. A fridge alone consumes close to 200 kWh.

Fixed that number some minutes after posting, missed a couple of magnitudes there :)

The antminer S19j (the j is important) consumes about 3.2kW at 90TH/s

I think you are really over estimating the size and importance of gamers

I don't think so... the PC gamer population is estimated to be about 1750 million, there are estimated to be around 1 million crypto miners.

That 1.7 billion probably includes anyone has that has played Solitaire on their computer once in the last year. I doubt even 25% of that are gamers that play GPU intensive games.

The 1 million crypto miners on the other hand are devoting at least 1 CPU/GPU to mining 24/7.

No it PC gamers (not a machine count), i was being specific, basically as in basically Windows Gamers with fraction of other

https://www.statista.com/statistics/420621/number-of-pc-game...

A very large portion of that number is phone gamers. Over half iirc. And nobody in any part of the gamer group is gaming 24/7.

> The high power consumption used by a heavy gamer (CPU + GPU) is easily indistinguishable and probably higher than a plain old individual miner since you would have CPU + GPU + Peripherals running.

My understanding is that (even top-tier) consumer-grade hardware and consumer electricity prices are not going to be enough to turn a profit, at least in current hashing conditions.

If a country detects 10,000 people running high GPU loads (not sure how they could tell the difference between GPU and, say, a space heater) then it probably would just be gamers and not miners.

Criminals growing weed (producing marihuana) in The Netherlands use a lot of electricity (often illegal tapped, so electricity company has financial incentive to get them busted ASAP) and generate a lot of heat. If you were doing mining in The Netherlands in a civilian building, you may get swatted at some point (there are already better reasons to avoid mining though).

Its very easy to distinguish a gamer from a miner/weed producer. Gamers, even when addicted, are human beings. Human beings sleep. Which means you are going to see patterns (normally at night) where usage is down. Also, a lot of gaming is mobile, increasingly in cloud, and every Xbox, Playstation, and Nintendo Switch is going to have a specific power profile (non-unique, except TV output) as well as a specific heat dissipation. And the usage of power and heat dissipation is both much lower than both mining and weed producers.

You can bet your ass both the electricity companies and the Dutch authority use big data to aid in their discovery of such criminal enterprises. However, the goal of a weed producer is to generate for a criminal enterprise, knowing they get busted. If they hidden their assets well, they can reap the benefits after the case (even if they bankrupted). And therein, in that cat and mouse game, lies a market for cryptocurrencies, unfortunately if I may add.

Because I am from The Netherlands, and I would like my children being able to visit the provinces of Holland where they were born (I get that nobody from China gives a shit about that though, but just to give ut a personal touch from my PoV). To achieve that, environmental waste must go down. Cryptocurrencies are the single most useless asset in that equation. They don't contribute in any positive way to the environmental issues we face. Its an eccentric if not downright narcissistic financial world, while the environmental clock is ticking.

I therefore agree with a world-wide ban on this MLM driven scam business (another downside). However, banning alone is not enough. It requires moderation by an already overburdened police force. If its banned though, you no longer need to differentiate between cryptocurrency mining and weed producing. And you don't go after Harry the 16 year old gamer or Joe the Norton user who mine a bit on the side. Its the big boys who matter.

Pretty sure a gamer, even heavy, still has to sleep sometimes.

I have assumed the miner would also turn off mines during the off peak hours to evade scrutiny

The crucial difference is that gaming is, at least theoretically, discouraging the user from it from an economical perspective, whereas for Bitcoin the more power you consume, the more positive your balance will get.

No matter how polluting, running around with a sports car will in some way counter most users' personal finance. But if using cars made free money, not only nearly everybody would be doing it, but there would be potentially no limit to "scaling up" the earnings, as long as one could cover the initial investment.

How many gamers do you know play a game that maxes out the usage of a single GPU for 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days of the year? Let alone dozens of them? There's absolutely no comparison in terms of energy use. Someone could probably game for a significant portion of a year on the energy use that a crypto person uses in an hour. It's entirely ridiculous to even make the comparison.

Eventually they will also ban gaming. Who are you to think that your entertainment is more important than the fate of the planet?

Netflix too. How much wasted screen energy and bandwidth do we need to consume until people recognize that streaming media is a blight on society?

HN is next. The amount of time wasted on this site should be used to save the planet instead!

I have already seen articles discussing the CO2 impact of streaming services. Of course the conclusion was that it is bad.

We could come up with some centralized entity or panel that could even be in charge of deciding which economic activities are sustainable and which aren't and prosecute people accordingly.

Relevant news story to what you're saying: US States Ban Certain Alienware PC Sales Because They Use Too Much Power

https://www.ign.com/articles/dell-alienware-gaming-pcs-six-s...

Wow that's insane. They should start with banning power hungry data centers whose whole purpose is to serve ads first.

A single person using their RTX3080 to make money back from it, while slightly problematic, is well within the expected power usage and will pay electricity prices that are expected of individual payers.

However, the miners with 150 GPUs, 500 GPUs, thousands of GPUs are absolutely a problem.

Problem because... you don't have them?

I want to buy a new video card too, but if the market is paying more than they are retailing for, but what can I do? I must compete with the miners.

If 150 cards are used to play fortnite, or 150 cards are used to mine, that is entirely the prerogative of the person that bought the cards. Is the problem that you don't like what someone else is doing with their own property?